2016 College Women of the Year: Sara Volz

"There's a saying I love: 'Science is a verb.' It's something you do, not something you study. It's exciting to question the world. At MIT I'm researching genome editing using a tool called CRISPR. It's a game changer—CRISPR is like scissors for DNA that can cut out bad genes and insert good ones. In 2014 my professor and I, along with a Ph.D. student, discovered how to turn one specific protein on and off in a cell. To think I'm helping push this biotechnology forward so that someday we can cure diseases? I'm proud of that. Not every experiment is successful; science is about failure. But each time you learn something."

—*Volz, a chemistry major, won Intel's 2013 Science Talent Search, and is co-author of two papers on CRISPR in Nature Biotechnology and *Cell.